Recently, solid state drives (SSDs) have been adopted widely as it provides lower latency input-output operations (IOs) than rotating disk based drives. However, the acquisition costs of SSDs are comparatively higher, and the performance of SSDs degrades as the number of bad blocks in the SSDs increases over time. As a buffer against bad blocks that increase over time and to also provide a storage area that can be used for garbage collection and other system functions, SSDs are typically over-provisioned by a set amount. To give an example, an SSD that has a logical capacity of 100 GB, i.e., the capacity that is exposed as being usable capacity, may be initially over-provisioned by a predetermined amount, e.g., 20 GB. This predetermined amount is set to be larger than a minimum amount that is needed for functions such as garbage collection so that the SSD will not fail as long as the number of bad blocks remain below a certain limit. It should be recognized that the larger this predetermined over-provisioning amount becomes, the longer the useful life of the SSD will be. In addition, a larger over-provisioning amount improves the IOPS (IOs per second) performance of the SSD. However, the over-provisioning amount should not be set too large because it takes away from the useful capacity of the SSD.